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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I had rather hoped that we might get through the Bill without any amendments to the abortion legislation being tabled, but as the noble Baroness rightly said, our efforts to get a Select Committee to review the 40 year-old Abortion Act did not succeed, and therefore I fully understand and respect her reasons for wishing to table this amendment again. I know how strongly she feels about this. I read in Hansard the speech she made in Committee. I should say at the beginning that this part of the abortion legislation was by far the most contentious and difficult one to deal with at the time that we were legislating for legal abortion, but I believe that the paragraph of the Abortion Act that the noble Baroness seeks to delete is more important now than it was in 1967, simply because medical advances and the customary screening of pregnant women has enabled severe abnormality to be detected at a much earlier stage than was the case 40 years ago. Although the number of abortions carried out under this paragraph of the Abortion Act is a tiny proportion of the total, it is none the less a serious matter. Indeed, when we were debating these issues in both Houses all that time ago, we were very concerned that we did not slip onto the slippery slope of eugenics in this matter. I am well aware that in some societies abortion is used as a method of selecting the sex of children, which I find completely abhorrent. Nevertheless, I believe that the noble Baroness is profoundly wrong when she suggests, as she did in Committee, that in some way the existence of this legislation is an offence to the dignity of disabled people. In the past five years, one of my relatives and a friend of mine have given birth to severely disabled children. I know that after the initial pain of that discovery was over, the entire family and everybody who came in contact with them felt delighted at every stage of progress that those children made. Sadly, one of them, my relative, did not survive. However, she lives on, not just in the memory of those who knew her, but because we set up a fund to raise money to help medical research into the heart defect from which she suffered. Therefore, her contribution to society, in her very short life, was substantial. As for my friend’s child, he is making as much progress as he can at his school, and we delight in that. There is no question of treating these people as, in any way, second-class citizens. The Beethoven argument, which I have heard so often, is fundamentally false because you cannot have abortion retrospectively. Nobody has ever said, either to Beethoven or to any of these children I have referred to, ““Oh, I wish you had never been born””. That is an absurd argument and not one that should be sustained. There have been challenges since this law came into being. There was one famous legal case taken in the courts, allegedly, because a foetus had been aborted with only a hare lip. The case was thrown out by the courts—rightly so, because as the medical Members of the House may tell us, a hare lip is often an indication of something far more serious. It is something that they have to judge in each case. We have to remind ourselves that all the abortion law does is to lay down the boundary of the criminal law. It is not a law that says what doctors or parents should do. It simply says that, in certain circumstances outlined in the law, if two doctors, ““in good faith””—the words are in the Act—together with the mother, decide that it is in the best interest for the foetus to be aborted, they can do that without criminal prosecution. It does not say how and when they should do that. That is an important matter. It is also the case—but again, the medical Members of the House will confirm this—that, very often, natural abortion, or as we more euphemistically call it, miscarriage, occurs when a foetus is abnormal and therefore the body rejects it. All that medical science is doing now, with screening, is assisting that process when nature has failed. Therefore, it is the case that the general clause dealt with in subsection (1) of the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness should be sustained. As to subsection (2) of her amendment, to which she spoke earlier, that was a change made in both Houses in 1990, as she rightly said. At that time, it was agreed, and I agreed with it, to reduce the age of assumption of viability, in the light of medical knowledge, from 28 weeks—which had existed, not from the Abortion Act 1967, but from the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929—to 24 weeks. That was agreed and it went through both Houses without demur. However, as a consequence, the section, to which the noble Baroness has drawn attention, was added, to say that, in the case of severely disabled foetuses, the 24 week limit would not apply. I must admit that I had some hesitation about that section. It meant that, as the noble Baroness said, an abortion could be carried out right up to the point of birth, which was contrary to the Infant Life Preservation Act, never mind the Abortion Act itself. However, my mind was settled on that issue by a conversation, which I will retell to the House, that I had with a distinguished professor of obstetrics at one of our leading universities. He told me about two cases referred to him, after the 24 week limit had passed, of mothers who were carrying foetuses which had no prospect of life. In the one case, after immense consultation and proper counselling, it was agreed that the pregnancy should be terminated and the mother helped to start a new and healthy pregnancy and that is what happened. In the other case, identical to the previous one, the mother, for reasons known to herself, which may have been religious or because of other conditions in the family—I do not know the circumstances—decided that they would rather have the baby born. The baby having been born dead, they took it in the family car from the hospital to their house to see the room that had been prepared for it, and then brought the dead baby back to the hospital. The professor made three points. First, tragically, the outcome was the same in both cases. He could do nothing about it. Secondly, both parents had been the subject of proper counselling—a subject which we come back to time and again when discussing abortion. Proper counselling is very important and in this case they had expert counselling. The third thing they had in common was that the parents were ultimately able to decide on their preference. That is terribly important. If the noble Baroness’s amendment were carried, that choice would be taken away and we in Parliament would be denying people a free choice on what to do in these difficult and tragic circumstances.